Gadget Freak: LED Matrix Helmet

Carlos Flores, a 10th-grade student, created a replica of a helmet worn by the electronic music duo Daft Punk. The front of this silver chrome helmet has a full LED matrix display that illuminates words and patterns. To shape the helmet, Carlos used a baseball helmet and cardboard. He added fiberglass and Bondo to give it structural integrity, and he smoothed it down to paint it.

Inside, the electronics include an 8x32 LED matrix array with LED drivers. An MSP430 LaunchPad controls the sequence of LED patterns. Carlos got help from his dad, Luis, to cycle through a lot of patterns and words and figure out what looked best.

Good to know that there are some other people that do this in high school. Really great project too, I like the use of auto body filler to cover the helmet, as well as the use of cheap and avaliable materials like carboard instead of something expensive like cnc cut or 3-d printed parts. Nice job!

That was a fun project! I'm sure he makes a big impression wearing that while on a DJ gig. It'd be fun to add some kind of voice-following algorithm to the display, so the visor looks like Kit, from the old Knight Rider TV show. Tack on a voice-altering chip and you could go totally robotic! That's the delight of projects like this -- it gets the imagination going.

Bondo was cool, Chuck. When I was young, I worked in an automaotive store that sold Bondo. A lot of lazy body guys would slap on tons of cheap Bondo rather than doing the more difficult work of pulling dents and smoothing the metal surface. That meant if you hit a good pot hole, whole chunks of Bondo would fall off your car.

Eleven years ago one of those rare, brilliant moments emerged from the crack staff of Design News: Let’s put the tinkerers among our audience community to work in designing and building some truly wacky devices. And Gadget Freak was born.

Focus on Fundamentals consists of 45-minute on-line classes that cover a host of technologies. You learn without leaving the comfort of your desk. All classes are taught by subject-matter experts and all are archived. So if you can't attend live, attend at your convenience.